Exploring Marketing Technology

Opinions are all my own

  • Verizon and YouTube further doom ad-supported TV

    My wife and I love movies. So last night, after watching the Bobby Darin biopic on DVD, Beyond The Sea, my wife was faced with a choice. I had gone to bed, and she could watch television or YouTube.

    She chose the latter, because she figured she could view kinescopes of Bobby Darin, to judge how accurately Kevin Spacey depicted the 1950’s crooner. She was right, and YouTube once again rewarded her the way television cannot.

    This afternoon we went to a matinee. Arriving early, we whiled away the time before the movie by watching Verizon’s V-Cast streaming video on my cell phone. In the darkened and quiet (pre-trailer) theater, we watched together more 3- to 5-minute eye candy. We chose segments of a favorite fake news program. Once again we were avoiding TV, and in fact circumvented the very ads that help to finance the basic cable programming coming out of my amazing LG 9800.

    Bobby Darin on YouTubeThe only limitation to this harmonica-size idiot box is a dearth of interesting programming. But that may soon change.

    Verizon and YouTube are reportedly in negotiations over the exclusive distribution of their content to their cell customers. This is exactly the magnitude of “pull” that domestic cell phone providers need to attract a critical mass of American cell phone users to this smallest of screens.

    It seems inevitable that very shortly, far more people will be peering into their cell phones instead of at advertising-supported television. Watching the erosion of standard broadcast business models is almost as enthralling as finding on my computer, within minutes, a nearly 50-year-old video recording of Mack The Knife. And soon this idle fun may be portable.

    And his teeth were … pearly white.

  • With Google for Print it’s all about reach

    Last year Google tested their ad auction concept in the print advertising space. Bill Wise in MediaPost had a theory for why this pilot wasn’t a huge success. In a word: “scarcity.”

    Google AdWords succeeds because there are only so many people searching for a term on any given day, and therefore only so many ad impressions than can run in front of this audience. It’s a finite supply of ads, and one that is perishable from one day to the next. Auctions are a perfect way for Google to optimize ad prices.

    But printed publications are different. If a newspaper or magazine sells more ads, they can print more pages to accommodate those ads. (Do you remember how fat Business 2.0 was in the heady months before the Dot Com Bust?)

    Google failed last year, but they aren’t giving up. They’ve just announced a deal that will include placement of select Google AdWords participants in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and many more. Later in this test they plan to expand into weekly news magazines.

    It fascinates me that they are looking at getting involved in the very medium whose circulations they are helping to shrink. In the last six months the average circulation figures of daily newspapers have fallen another 2.8 percent, according to Dan Mitchell of the NY Times. True, he tries to put a positive spin on this news, citing a statistic that if you factor in online versions of the publications, readership is actually up significantly. But that actually helps to make my point: Why isn’t Google satisfied with running their ads on the fastest growing portion of the news business?

    I can only think it’s reach. And I don’t mean just readers. I’m thinking portability.

    Until this county develops a taste for news delivered to a cell phone or PDA, ink on paper is still the most reliable way to follow Americans into the many nooks and crannies of their day.

    I’m only half joking when I speculate that Google may have realized that their AdWords were doing wonderfully in the American office and den, but were failing miserably in the bathroom.

  • Verbing your trademark away, and why no one was ever caught yahooing

    One of the web’s most famous trademark owners recently had a conniption about people using “to google” and “googling” generically. Today another victim of this brand name erosion — think permission marketing — offers some great advice on branding in the Internet Age. The gist: Chill out. But overlooked is how Google’s superior search engine isn’t the main reason it is them crying in their beers instead of Yahoo.

    Mr. Godin takes the long view of these trademark infringements. If someone starts using your brand name generically, and you own that domain name, how much real brand damage can be done? Consumers can find you even if they don’t google you. Oops.

    He then talks about the ability of consumers to “verb” your brand in the first place. Comparing two popular social bookmarking sites, Digg and Reddit, you can easily see why only one of them is at risk of genericide. It sounds meaningful when you digg a site. Not so much if you reddit.

    Naseem Javed, author of Naming for Power and Domain Wars, sheds more light on how some names are easier to verb than others:

    Studies have shown that certain alpha-structures do not easily lend themselves to verbing. Despite their fame and popularity in daily language, these types of names survive over time and remain powerful corporate brands while enjoying a proprietary status. Some examples are Yahoo, Apple, Netscape, Telus, Microsoft, Sony, Rolex and Nintendo. Have you ever heard, “I Rolexed and realized I was late?” or, “Leave me alone, I’m Appling”?

    Unlike Mr. Godin, Mr. Javed thinks Google’s easily verbed name is serious reason for concern, and calls this misuse of the brand name, “A corporate nightmare — a code-red alert.”

    Which brings me back to Yahoo. They should be happy, right?

    Ten years ago when they had a similar market share to what Google has today, people were rollerblading and fedexing but not yahooing. What if people were yahooing in the pre-Google era? (And yes, they actually tried to trigger a trend, with their “Do you Yahoo?” campaign of a few years back.)

    If that were so, and the dictionaries featured them in their pages, Google would probably have a little less of the search market today. That’s because folks would sometimes assume someone really did go to Yahoo when they said they yahooed. But they don’t.

    If I were Yahoo, I would side with Seth Godin. And I would consider the lack of genericide of their brand name a corporate code-red alert.

  • Two Flashy search engines vie for eyeballs

    What if you were presented with the challenge of grabbing a piece of the search engine pie? Two development teams approached the challenge with the same programming application and produced results that could not be any more different. First on the scene (by several years) is the people at KartOO Technologies. Their search program can be found at KartOO.com.

    Click for a larger graphicThese folks specialize in organizing information visually. In the example to the right, I searched for “SAT testing.” The results are plotted out as though they were clusters of information islands. I then moved my mouse over a word in the middle of several islands (“offers”). The modifier showed up in the search box, and the items related to “offers” are highlighted and joined by curved lines. It’s a clever way to parse through popular ways that pages are related — all in a visually entertaining (well, as least intriguing) experience.

    Entertainment is definitely the goal of this most recent competitor in the search engine category. I won’t add to the din of bloggers commenting on Ms. Dewey (msdewey.com). All I will say about this comely peer of the late Jeeves (of Ask.com) is she is the most video-centric — and talkative — search experience you are likely to find. And the developers? None other than Microsoft Live Search.

    Click for a larger image

    Two Macromedia Flash search engines deliver two extremely different experiences. Which is more successful?

  • Burger King masks and eBay are big this Halloween

    Before the internet there was little chance for enterprising types to profit from holiday-generated scarcity. I’m thinking of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, which were the must-have collectibles for much of the 1980s, and caused frenzied pre-Christmas rushes at bricks-and-mortar stores. Now there are online markets to help resolve supply / demand imbalances. I was reminded of this as I talked to my friend at BuyCostumes, the world’s largest e-commerce costume site.

    Earlier this month I wrote that if you remove the constraints of shelf space dictated by a physical costume store, you see the same Long Tail sales trends that other categories experience (at BuyCostomes, at least). When variety of product is virtually unlimited (pun intended), niche sales can be very profitable.

    Conversely, when there is a lot of demand for something in limited supply, not only will you sell out quickly, but you’ll see that product continue through the food chain until it finds its ideal price. Certainly for Christmas items, but also for Halloween, which is now the second largest American holiday in terms of spending.

    A fact I was reminded of when I learned that Burger King costumes are big this year.

    BuyCostumes has an exclusive deal to sell these masks this year, and sold nearly 2,000 of them over the course of about 6 hours (cumulatively, because they sold them in batches over several days).

    The retail price was $39.99. Many who scooped them up immediately put them back on the market. My contact at BuyCostumes guessed they were going for as much as $80 each on eBay and finally settled down to $65, including shipping and handling. Unfortunately, the speculators, plus eBay and perhaps pay-per-click ad sites (see the ads on the Google search I did this weekend) were the only parties to profit from this demand spike.

    For several years I’ve been reading that movie theaters are talking about putting their tickets for extremely busy nights up for a higher price than normal, and conversely, marketing their slow nights at lower ticket costs. That day is still a long way off, for social reasons and not technical ones.

    Similarly, I wonder if holiday-related e-commerce sites should consider having their own markets for their hottest products, so they can benefit from these demand spikes. After all, oil companies do it. And isn’t a Burger King mask that can be re-sold many times on eBay and Craigslist just as fungible as a gallon of sweet crude?

    The only constraint I can think of: Society may not be prepared to have a merchant with exclusive rights to a product take every action to benefit from its popularity. The negative PR implications of an online auction by the seller may be too great, leaving the opportunity in the hands of the speculators and eBay.

    You’ve got to wonder. If the frantic parents outside the toy stores of the 1980’s were told there would be an auction for the last 10 Cabbage Patch Kids, and “Who will start the bidding at $100?” … would there be a riot? And would there be a flame-fest from consumers if modern-day eTailers did the same?